Double Take

Joe Franklin, the television host and talk-show pioneer, died this past weekend, at the age of eighty-eight. Franklin began hosting “The Joe Franklin Show” in 1951 and continued hosting it for more than forty years, until 1993. He estimated that, during that time, he interviewed more than three hundred thousand guests. (If you were born too late to watch Franklin’s show, you may recognize him from the they-got-famous montage in “Ghostbusters”: he’s the talk-show host who asks Dan Akroyd’s Ray Stantz, “How is Elvis, and have you seen him lately?”)

In 1927, James Thurber wrote a parody of “ ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.” It was called “A Visit from Saint Nicholas (in the Ernest Hemingway Manner),” and it began this way:

It was the night before Christmas. The house was very quiet. No creatures were stirring in the house. There weren’t even any mice stirring. The stockings had been hung carefully by the chimney. The children hoped that Saint Nicholas would come and fill them.

You’ll find this piece, and a few more of our favorites, below. Happy holidays!

In 2005, The New Yorker published “Outsourcing Torture,” Jane Mayer’s account of the C.I.A.’s “extraordinary rendition” program. “Rendition was originally carried out on a limited basis,” Mayer wrote, “but after September 11th, when President Bush declared a global war on terrorism, the program expanded beyond recognition—becoming, according to a former C.I.A. official, ‘an abomination.’ ”

“Colonel Harland Sanders, the fried-chicken magnate, who seems in public to be as jolly and serene as Santa Claus, is actually one of the world’s foremost worriers,” William Whitworth wrote in The New Yorker in 1970. “The Colonel maintains a vigilant fretfulness in the face of overwhelming good fortune. He has won money, fame, and the affection of his fellow-citizens”—and yet, all the same, he is “haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere, is doing something to hurt his chicken.” Such is the life of the businessperson. The competition never ends. Success leads to fear. Then, ideally, fear leads to invention.

Over the past few months, we’ve been putting together collections of our favorite stories from the archive. (Recently, we highlighted pieces about writers, actresses, and Presidents.) This week, we’ve picked five great stories about the world of business:

Over the past few months, we’ve been sharing selections of classic New Yorker stories from our archive. Previous anthologies have featured some of our favorite pieces on writers, directors, comedians, and artists. This week, we turn to the Oval Office, with a collection of five articles about the lives of Presidents, from Jonathan Schell’s reflection on the lessons of the Nixon era to David Remnick’s exploration of Bill Clinton’s second act.

Construction of the Berlin Wall started on August 13, 1961. In October of the next year,The New Yorkerpublished “Die Mauer” (“The Wall”), a Profile of the Berlin Wall, written by John Bainbridge. Bainbridge travelled to Berlin, walked along the Wall, and collected stories of East Berliners who had tried, with and without success, to escape. Here’s an atypical, but memorable, account of one man’s strategy:

A photographer named Horst Beyer convinced the East German authorities that a good stunt to help publicize the twelfth anniversary of [Walter] Ulbricht’s regime, on October 10, 1961, would be to publish pictures of a few shapely members of a Communist women’s sports club in the act of presenting the guardians of the wall with bouquets. He accordingly took a few athletic beauties to Checkpoint Charlie, and, as the girls presented their flowers to the Vopos [the Volkspolizei], snapped one photograph after another. In posing his group, Beyer moved closer and closer to the white line on the pavement marking the border, and when one of the Vopos helpfully called out, “Be careful that you don’t step across the line!” Beyer turned and ran into West Berlin.

Beyer’s escape happened only two months after the Wall came up, during a time when it was still an improvised structure. It was soon made more permanent. “Die Mauer” chronicles the slow strengthening of the Wall, and the increasingly risky attempts of East Berliners to breach it. It’s one of seven stories that we’ve gathered to commemorate the anniversary of the fall, twenty-five years ago, on November 9, 1989. “Die Mauer” is available to everyone online; the others are available to subscribers in our online archive.

In Truman Capote’s Profile of Marlon Brando, published in 1957, he writes of “the chameleon ease” with which Brando transforms himself into the character of Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” This particular talent for metamorphosis is a central characteristic of all of the actors featured in this week’s archive collection. Over the past few months, we’ve highlighted selections of New Yorker stories on writers, filmmakers, actresses, and chefs. This week, we’ve pulled together a collection of six classic pieces about leading men, from Brando and Cary Grant to Sean Penn and Ben Stiller.

“The Duke in His Domain” (1957): Truman Capote profiles Marlon Brando during the filming of Joshua Logan’s “Sayonora,” in Kyoto, Japan. “I was never sure about acting,” Brando says. “Then, when I was in ‘Streetcar,’ and it had been running a couple of months, one night—dimly, dimly—I began to hear this roar. It was like I’d been asleep, and I woke up here sitting on a pile of candy.”

The writing life is an anxious, competitive, and disappointing one (“Life is so constructed that the event does not, cannot, match the expectation,” Charlotte Brontë wrote). But it can also be thrilling and joyous, with occasional intimations of greatness. This week, we’ve collected six pieces about writers from our archive, each capturing, in its own way, the excitement of transmuting life into literature.

“The Hunger Artist” (2000): “I thought I was a student. I thought I was a teacher,” Susan Sontag tells Joan Acocella. “And then I discovered that I liked to tell stories and make people cry.”

“The Dead Are Real” (2012): Larissa MacFarquhar Profiles Hilary Mantel. “When she wakes in the morning,” MacFaquhar writes, “she likes to start writing right away, before she speaks, because whatever remnants sleep has left are the gift her brain has given her for the day.”

In his 1994 New Yorkerprofile of Federico Fellini, Clive James wrote that one of the Italian director’s gifts as a filmmaker was his ability to see what was universal in his own life and to expertly convey that onscreen. While the directors featured in this week’s archive collection come from varied backgrounds, many of them share Fellini’s skill at translating personal narrative into a broader vision. In previous months, we’ve offered selections of classic New Yorker stories on chefs, artists, actresses, and scientists. For this collection, we’ve pulled together six pieces about directors and the craft of filmmaking, from Jean-Luc Godard’s early embrace of pop culture in “Breathless” to Mira Nair’s flair for documenting the complexities of cultural identity in “Salaam Bombay!”